Page 155 - Fourth Wing

“There’s no alternative. If you don’t make it, you can’t get to

Presentation, can you? Take your position, Sawyer,” Professor Emetterio
orders, and Sawyer moves to the beginning of the course. “After he makes

it past the final obstacle, so everyone can learn from this cadet completing

the course, the rest of you will start every sixty seconds. And…go!”
Sawyer is off like a shot. He easily runs the fifteen feet across the single

log spinning parallel with the cliff face and then the raised pillars, but it

takes him three rotations inside the wheel before he jumps through the lone
opening, but other than that, I don’t see a single misstep in the first ascent.

Not. One.

He turns and rushes toward a series of giant hanging balls that makes up
the second ascent, jumping and hugging one after another. His feet back on

the ground, he turns again and heads up the third ascent, which is divided
into two sections. The first part has giant metal rods hanging parallel to the

cliff wall, and he easily swings arm over arm, using his body’s weight and

momentum to swing the bar forward and reach the next bar hanging half a
foot higher than the previous as he climbs the side of the cliff. From the last

bar, he jumps onto a series of shaking pillars that make up the second half
of this ascent before finally leaping back onto the gravel path.

By the time he reaches the fourth ascent, the spinning logs Aurelie’s

brother warned us about, Sawyer’s made it all look like child’s play, and I
start to feel a bubble of hope that maybe the course isn’t as difficult as it

looks from the ground.

But then he faces a giant chimney formation rising high above him at a
twenty-degree angle and pauses.

“You got this!” Rhiannon yells from my side.

As though he heard, he sprints toward the leaning chimney and flings
himself upward, grabbing onto the sides by forming an X with his body,

then starts hopping up the conduit until he reaches the end and drops down
in front of the final obstacle, a massive ramp that reaches up to the top of